Death After Death

Chapter 35: Intermezzo

The darkness came and went for Simon, though it was impossible to judge exactly how long each cycle took. Still, each time his view of the desert was replaced by dirt and shadows, it was utterly terrifying.

He would be plunged into absolute darkness for some indefinite period, with nothing but a dull ache for company. Then he would suddenly be allowed to see the wider world above the sand for days or weeks until the next storm rearranged things again.

The first time he got his tedious desert view back after an eternity of darkness, he thanked a god he didn’t even believe in for saving him. He would have wept tears of joy if he’d been capable of such a thing.

He couldn’t, though.

So, instead, he burned every one of the stars in the night sky into his mind, trying to make sure he never took them for granted again. But no matter how hard he tried to remember them and their exact positions, they faded after weeks or months of being alone in the dark.

Sometimes things changed or stood out, but in the months and years that must have followed his petrification, boredom, and monotony were the rule, not the exception. Sometimes the basilisk would return and eat more of his body, filling Simon with hope.

It never entirely managed to get to his head, though, and so in the end, he continued to exist as a disembodied mind as he watched the world go by. Twice he saw merchant caravans in the distance, though they gave this place a wide berth for obvious reasons. Once, he saw a group of warriors entering the ruins to slay the thing that had done this to him.

However, Simon couldn’t shout a warning or even see if they were successful. Because of the way he was pointing, he would live forever in mystery. Part of him hoped they had failed because he would only get out of this if the thing finally finished eating him. Most of him wanted vengeance more, though, and he hoped the monster was just as dead as its victims that were scattered around this city, getting its bones bleached by the hot desert sun for the rest of eternity.

All the dark periods he was forced to endure seemed endless at the time, but eventually they ended. Then, one day Simon was submerged so far underneath the suffocating sand that he never reemerged. Intellectually he knew that a few weeks could feel like an eternity, but there was something altogether different about the way he felt after being lost in the void for months or years. His thought process started to dull as he could feel his mind slowly grinding to a halt.

This was a new terror that felt more like the feeling of hunger he'd had when he was a zombie that obliterated his mind rather than the fear he’d had for the darkness up until now, and he struggled against it as hard as he could. He spent that quiet eternity slowly revisiting every memory he could think of and exploring all of his hobbies anew in an effort to fend off that horrible mental death that he could feel lurking at the edges of his mind.

He replayed all his favorite games, noting how unrealistic some of the sword animations were and adjusting them to better reflect the mechanics he was now much more aware of. He had his favorite streamers watch him while he played, critiquing his performance, and noting just how empty their jokes were compared to the traumatic, gruesome scene that the gameplay was slowly morphing into.

He invented a third game to his favorite series, Sword of Glory. He based its level design off The Pit as he went deeper and deeper into the darkness. Of course - his version made sense and had stats and abilities, but other than that - it was an authentic recreation of his attempt to reach level 99 and finally put Helades in her place.

Even though it was his game, in his head, he never succeeded in making it all the way to the bottom before losing interest. Whether it was because he couldn’t imagine a well of darkness deep enough to descend into or because he simply couldn’t picture himself winning, he couldn’t say. Still, he never got past the giant fire-breathing dragon on level 43, no matter how many times he tried. So, he eventually moved on to other hobbies.

He turned the cabin on the first level into an elaborate farm. Once the valley was totally developed and the goblins were slain, he got bored again. He had no idea how long he’d been in the darkness now. It had been years, probably. It was difficult to say, but his mind felt like it was starting to short-circuit and at times language itself started to falter for him as his internal monologue ran out of things to say.

Humans were social animals. They were damaged enough by solitary confinement or being shipwrecked on a desert island, and either of those would have seemed like a paradise compared to what he was enduring.

As the feeling of exhaustion started to spread over his mind once more, he was reminded of his scoutmaster from back when he hadn’t yet learned to hate people. “If you’re lost in the snow, and you go to sleep, then you’ll never wake up again.”

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Somehow, despite his failing imagination and fraying sanity, that memory came to him from the dimmest recesses of his mind just as he felt like everything was shutting down. It wasn’t snowing, but it didn’t matter. If he went to sleep now, he would never wake up again. He was sure of that now.

That fear gave him a second wind, forcing him to redouble his efforts as he turned everything he had left to 11. There was still hope that the thing would find and kill him, wasn’t there? That should be enough to save him, shouldn’t it? Simon wasn’t sure, but he pretended he was as he blasted his mind with commercials and anime fight sequences.

Like an exhausted trucker trying to stay awake after the meth had run out, he forced himself to explore anything that might be interesting. TV commercials? Annoying jingles? Earworm songs that he hated but could never quite get out of his head? He examined them all, and only once that was done did he decide to rewatch the longest anime he could think of, one remembered scene at a time.

It was filled with guest stars in the form of his favorite childhood cartoons and video game characters by the time it was done. That didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was that he forced his spirit to keep functioning.

He’d been down here long enough that he was starting to believe that this was genuinely the underworld. Death legitimately lurked somewhere in the darkness just beyond his circle of consciousness, and it was only the light of imagination that kept it away.

It was sometime during this endless standoff, without warning, that two hands reached down from somewhere above him, pulling him out of his eternal night and into the bright light of day. It was only when the person rotated the head that he could see that they were slender female hands, and a second later, he saw who they were attached to. Helades. It was an unthinkable twist and so unlikely that his first thought was he’d finally lost his mind.

It had to be real, though, because suddenly, he was seeing things again with a level of detail that he’d almost forgotten existed. His imagination was only a pathetic shadow of this. She set his head on a low wall, then she sat down next to him at the edge of his field of vision so that he could enjoy the gorgeous view of the setting sun.

It was the first one he’d seen in a long time - maybe the first one he’d ever really seen in his whole life. She was talking to him, but he couldn’t hear her as he focused on the sunset. He’d remembered red, yellow, and blue, but the thousand little shades of orange and purple between them blended together in a way that he would have sworn was impossible in his almost empty mind.

With some effort, Simon tore his attention away from the majesty of nature and forced himself to focus only on what she had to say. That she’d bothered to pull him up out of the darkness instead of leaving him there forever was a miracle, and he needed to know why she’d done it.

“... it’s like when I told you that only one soul in twenty makes it beyond the tenth level? Well, only one in a hundred makes it past level twenty, which is where you are now,” she said simply as she looked at the sunrise with him. Simon struggled to remember if he’d known this was the twentieth level or if that was new information.

“Though you'll have to finally kill the basilisk to succeed of course, I like to come through here every century or so and help some of the heroes that get stuck. Given how many of you that happens to, it seems only fair,” she sighed. “Of course, given how long you’ve been inside your own head now, there might not be anything in there worth saving, but we’ll see, won’t we?”

He wanted to scream at her, to ask why she hadn’t freed him before now or how it was she could sleep at night knowing she did this to people routinely. The silence of everything that was unsaid then was deafening, but the anger never left his mind. All he could do was stare at the slowly setting sun with her in silence.

“You probably think this is the worst thing that could happen to you, don’t you?” she finally asked, breaking the silence. “That an eternity in stone is the most terrible thing imaginable. I wish that was true, but even with the sort of quasi-immortality that this awful place grants, there are so many other worse things that could happen. If the shadows were to get you, or you were to make a misstep in the chapel… There are so many horrible places between here and the mazes, but there’s nothing for it.”

She lapsed into silence again. “Well, the less said about that, the better, I’m afraid. The point is that this world was always a monstrosity waiting to happen, and many terrible things need to be resolved to fix that. You’re starting to show just a hint of promise Simon. I mean it. Keep it up, and maybe you’ll be able to do more than care about a kill streak or a speed run one day.”

Simon desperately wanted to rebut any of those points or ask her what the hell she was talking about, but he was still trapped, screaming in his mind. Then suddenly, she was gone. He didn’t know how long she’d been missing, and he certainly hadn’t seen her leave. What he did notice, though, was the shadow that was approaching from his right side.

It was only now that both eyes were uncovered again that he could appreciate that his left eye still had perfectly clear vision. While at the same time, his right had begun to blur so severely that all the stars in the sky had little halos around them.

He idly wondered how long it would take for wind and sand to erode his stone eye so that it would be noticeably pitted. Still, he wouldn’t have done the math even if he could figure out how as he studied the movement that was getting closer and closer to him.

Even though he could only make out the vaguest outline in the darkness, he knew exactly what it was. He’d never be able to forget the basilisk.

For a moment, he worried that Helades had put him up somewhere too high, just out of reach, but that proved to be misplaced as the thing came straight toward him and, in a moment of blessed relief, crushed his skull between its giant jaws, ending his pain.